If you follow up the BT5 meta after releasing 1st year anniversary promo card, you know that the [BT4-114] AncientGaruru deck makes it to be in the winning list, it deserves to be Tier-2 meta in BT5. The warp digivolution strategy needs to be played faster to win the game, AncientGaruru is fast enough when it evolves from LV4 Lobomon promo, but there is some certain weakness it has. Then how the Gabumon – Bond of Friendship can cover that?
Gabumon Bond of Friendship
Gabumon Bond of Friendship is a LV7 digimon with 14000DP in BT6 Double Diamond, it can warp evolution from LV3 Gabumon (any color Gabumon) into this digimon by paying 3 cost and trash 2 of your security cards, you must execute it fast and end the game fast in order to make the strategy work. This digimon can at least "unsuspend" once when the LV3 Gabumon in its digivolution source is not [BT6-019] Gabumon with its first "When attacking" effect. The power of this digimon lands in second "when attacking" effect, when it can return 1 opponent's LV5 or lower digimon in the bottom of its owner deck. With this effect, Gabumon – Bond of Friendship no longer needs to worry about opponent's blocker, for each attack it can return 1 opponent LV5 or lower digimon, the chance to wipe out opponent's board is here. (This is also AncientGaruru's weakness).
The Rush of GabuBOF and AncientGaruru
This deck is created by a Tamer in Philippines named Kelvin Klein, he is able to win the unofficial online tourney with this deck. This deck strategy is very straight forward, there is 15 cards of LV3 digimon, 11 cards for LV4 digimon (all of them are hybrid type), 8 cards for LV6 digimon, no LV5 digimon. 4 copies of new tamer Matt Ishida for Gabumon – Bond of Courage and 3 copies of Davis Motomiya. There is 9 option cards are used in this deck. There is 2 pillars that decides the game strategy, AncientGaruru evolution chain and Gabumon Bond of Friendship evolution chain, the detail for each of them is given in detail below.
The AncientGarurumon with Hybrid Digimon
The advantage of this combo is that it costs only 3 memory to evolve from a LV3 digimon to LV6 AncientGarurumon without sacrificing anything. Once we reach this level, we can do 2 checks to opponent security because it can unsuspend once with "When attacking" effect. Even we need to delete this digimon at the end of the turn, but it also helps to hard-play 1 blue LV4 or below digimon card with [Hybrid] in its form for free. There is total 15 digimon cards that is "Hybrid" form digimon, so it is easy to draw as well as have it available in hand to play.
Gabumon - Bond of Friendship Threat
People predicts this deck is going to be in Tier 1 or Tier 0.5 of BT6 meta, why is that?
Gabumon – Bond of Friendship holds enough power to deal with any kind of opponent, the speed power, the ranking power, DP power and "removal" power.
To evolve from a LV3 Gabumon into LV7 Gabumon – Bond of Friendship, the "must" condition is you must have [BT6-088] Matt Ishida in play to use its [Main] effect for the warp evolution, the "best condition" is the LV3 Gabumon to be evolved is new [BT6-019] Gabumon because its inherited effect gives this digimon "unsuspend" once per turn when it attacks.
We only need to pay 3 costs to evolve into this LV7 Gabumon Bond of Friendship, at the same time we will need to trash 2 of our security cards as a tradeoff condition. During the turn that Gabumon Bond of Friendship appear in the battle and do attacking, if we have the [BT6-019] Gabumon in its evolution's source, this Digimon can attacks 3 opponent's security cards, return up to 3 opponent's LV5 or lower digimon to its owner hand. If opponent's board is wipe out, even if we have no security card left in our security stack, we still have the chance to win this turn with [Hybrid] type digimon evolves into a blue Tamer or win in next turn.
Since the Gabumon Bond of Friendship is a LV7 digimon with 14000 DP, only high cost option card is powerful enough to delete it.
Draw Power and Memory
This deck strongly needs draw and "search card" power to get AncientGaruru, promo Lobomon and Gabumon BOF and blue Tamer Matt Ishida.
- The [P-036] Blue Memory Boost is the best card for "search" the right card and save "2 memory" to use when needed while Tamer Davis Motomiya helps to secure 3 memories when starting the turn and search top 3 cards to add 1 blue and 1 green digimon to hand "when play".
- The digitama Upamon and BT1 Gabumon give draw power for the deck.
- The LV3 hybrid Strabimon is to provide the "search card" power for hybrid digimon and blue Tamer.
There is 7 tamer cards are using in this deck, it is high chance that we have 2 or more tamer is in the battle. We can evolve blue tamer into hybrid LV4 digimon to do a final check to end the games, at this time we need more memory to stay in our turn after evolving, that is why there is 4 copies of Hammer Spark in this deck.
Options - Taking care of opponent's powerful Digimon
Since the Gabumon BOF is only able to return the LV5 or lower digimon to its owner hand, this deck includes 2 copies of Cocytus Breath (Ice Wolf Claw) to deal with an opponent's higher level (such as LV6 or LV7) Digimon. From the owner's own words "hand-bricks can occur when we put 3-4 copies of this card into the deck".
Player Experiences
Here is the tourney report and the thoughts from Kelvin Klein, the Tamer who created and tested out this deck:
"We Decided to hold a BT06 legal tournament using untap.in as a preparation for the upcoming set release on MAY-28. I used my own build of Gabumon Bond of Friendship Deck and got 1st place.
